The Greens have popped by again, dropping another leaflet through my letterbox. It features three young women informing Hackney voters that Labour, whose candidates the borough habitually prefers, does not deserve their support any more. The local Labour council, the trio of Greens stress, is preparing to make big budget cuts, forced on it by a Labour government that is “continuing the Conservative legacy”. There are, they assert, “credible alternatives” to this.
Of course, they don’t go into detail. But the broad message is clear. So is a ward-level activist focus on community safety, litter-picking and “listening”. The Greens have a gap to close if they are to unseat Labour from my Hackney ward next May: in 2022, their best-placed candidate finished fourth with 881 votes, around half the total of the lowest-placed of the three Labour winners. They face comparable challenges in several other wards in Hackney and in other London boroughs. You can tell, though, that they fancy their chances.
Why wouldn’t they? Labour’s national unpopularity, which continues to inspire astonishment and glee, has been reflected in London by-election results. Polls say the party is still the capital’s most popular. Yet, even, so it has been losing votes to an array of challengers, varying from borough to borough, seat to seat. The next local elections are still seven months away, but if Labour retains control of the 21 boroughs out of 32 it won in 2022, it will be a surprise. The party could sustain heavy losses. Have its national leaders spotted that? If so, do they care?
London voters could not be blamed for thinking Camden’s own Sir Keir Starmer has forsaken the capital, or at least concluded that it suits him to look as if he has. His party conference speech, though accomplished and refreshing in several ways, reprised his Chancellor’s spending review endorsement of tendentious complaints that London has long had preferential treatment.
With “one clear voice”, the PM declared in Liverpool, Labour must say “we should invest more outside of London and the South East”. Thanks for nothing, London’s million-and-a-half Labour voters might respond, that 43 per cent who provided Starmer with a third of his general election majority. In an address that upbraided the politics of grievance, Labour’s leader saw fit to indulge one of the most destructive.
Depressingly, this won him a big cheer – depressingly, yet unsurprisingly. The populist myth that Londoners live the high life at (in particular) honest northern folk’s expense is deeply entrenched and fiercely clung to when challenged.
Yet the reality is that of the £218.4 billion raised in tax revenue in London in 2022/23 (the most recent year for which figures are available), £43.6 billion were spent elsewhere. London and Londoners subside almost all the rest of the UK, and have done so for years. It is a bedrock truth of national life – a truth the national government dares not speak.
The electoral calculation appears clear: most of the Labour parliamentary seats under the greatest threat are outside London, and the biggest threat in most of them comes from Reform UK, whose admirers detest everything London stands for and lots of things they (wrongly) think it does. Therefore, pointedly agreeing that London should come bottom of the spending pecking order might seem a bright idea.
There are, though, two big reasons why Starmer needs to realise that it isn’t.
One is about self-preservation. At some point, Labour needs to stop bleeding support at an alarming rate and at least consolidate at a level of local election losses that is normal for a party in national power. If it doesn’t, Starmer’s leadership will be loudly questioned again and a sense of crisis about his administration may become impossible to shift. Imagine the reaction if even London, so often called “a Labour city”, goes off the party in a spectacular way.
The other reason concerns the economy. Do I have to repeat again that London provides almost a quarter of all UK economic output and remains by far the biggest engine of UK economic power? Do I have to point out once more that London is the goose that lays the country’s golden eggs, and that starving the goose means fewer eggs for all? And then we have the local government Fair Funding Review, with its alarming lack of fairness to most boroughs. The perils that poses for Labour are not lost on Hackney’s Greens. They won’t be lost on Londoners, either.
Feeding anti-London feelings might seem like canny politics. But in the end, neither Labour nor the country can afford it.
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